


[Fandom stats] Femslash: where is it?

by toastystats (destinationtoast)



Series: Fandom Stats [4]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: F/F, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-05-28
Packaged: 2018-01-26 22:31:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1704926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/pseuds/toastystats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of my fandom stats and discussions about femslash and its scarcity.  Includes a list the fandoms with the most femslash, as of late 2013.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Which fandoms have the most femslash?

**Author's Note:**

> **If you're interested in femslash, you should also check out my[2016 Femslash February stats](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6045463) and my [January 2015 femslash deep dive](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/109143033944/toastystats-femslash-stats-2015-femslash).**
> 
> **I'm aware that a bunch of the images are broken below -- working on fixing it. Sorry! In the meantime, the links to the original Tumblr posts should still work!**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (originally posted to [Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/57976709573/which-fandoms-have-the-most-femslash-on-ao3-i) on August 11, 2013)

I looked at which fandoms on AO3 have the most femslash, both in terms of absolute numbers, and in terms of percentage of overall works. I also took an initial look at the amount of genderswap labeled in the F/F tag for the popular fandoms. [note: I did not yet understand AO3's system of canonical fandom tags when I did this, so the fandoms listed here are sometimes a bit odd.]

 **Caveat:** due to processing errors, a number of fandoms did not get properly analyzed - mostly ones whose names contain non-ascii characters, but apparently also Les Mis (and possibly others). I’m not sure yet if/how that affects these graphs. But please point out to me any fandoms with a bunch of femslash that are missing! 

**Methodology**

I crawled all the fandoms on AO3 and grabbed the total number of works, and the number labeled F/F. For the purposes of this analysis, I then discarded all fandoms with fewer than 50 works (a somewhat arbitrary threshold that I chose so that I would be pointing out fandoms to people that actually had more than a handful of works — and to ensure that I didn’t analyze the rare fandoms where 100% of the fanfic is F/F because there’s only one fic :) ).

I sorted by percent F/F (Figure 1) and by overall number of F/F works (Figure 2). For Figure 2, I also did a search for fandom name + F/F + “Genderswap” to see how many F/F fics were explicitly also labeled genderswap. I did not remove strongly overlapping fandom tags for this analysis, as they were not identical in F/F makeup.

**Results and Discussion**

The chart and spreadsheet below give a good list of fandoms that have a high percentage of F/F works — the chart shows fandoms where the majority of the works are labeled F/F; I’m glad that there are some of those out there on AO3, even if I wish there were more! And I’m heartened to see that some of these fandoms have hundreds of F/F fanworks.

The next chart shows the 30 fandoms with the highest absolute count of F/F works, and these are almost all the same as the biggest fandoms overall. The major exceptions were Once Upon a Time, Warehouse 13, Pitch Perfect, and Rizzoli & Isles — most of which also were on Figure 1 and have a very high proportion of F/F fic. 

When I did earlier analyses that discussed femslash, commenters had asked how much of that was actually genderswapped male characters. This analysis does not fully address that question, but I did look at the number of F/F fics in the (largely male-character-dominated) fandoms in Figure 2 that were labeled “Genderswap”. Those fics are shown in red.

It’s important to note that just because fic has both these tags does not mean that the F/F pairing in the fic is genderswapped — could be a different character. I also have not yet looked into how many F/F pairings involve a genderswapped character but do not use that tag. However, it looks like the amount of F/F that is genderswapped might not actually be too high in the male-centric popular fandoms — if people are doing a good job labeling their genderswap.

**Limitations**

This is only representative of AO3. I suspect FFNet has a higher proportion of F/F (it’s less M/M-focused, in my limited analyses so far) -- but unfortunately, FFNet doesn't break things down by relationship category or ship, the way AO3 does, so it's difficult to do this kind of analysis there. I also expect that there are probably a number of F/F focused fandoms that have their primary homes on fandom-specific archives, or LJ, or other places. If anyone wants to share recs for fandoms or sites that have a high ratio of F/F, please add those in the comments!


	2. Do fandoms with more female characters have more femslash?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted to [Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/53128250410/why-is-there-so-little-femslash) on June 16, 2013.

[This was my first stab at answering why there is so little femslash, and looking at stats on the topic; more possible reasons follow in the next chapter.] 

I suspect one of the main reasons is the lack of source material with at least two strong, well-developed female characters. As Linda Holmes at the Monkey See blog recently observed, [At The Movies, The Women Are Gone](http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/06/14/191568762/at-the-movies-the-women-are-gone) (which she backs up with stats at the link — go read it; it’s fabulous):

> I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
> 
> There are not any.

This pattern — not limited to movies — severely limits the number of interesting potential female pairings for fandom to play with. 

If I’m right that this is a major factor, then we should see more femslash in fandoms of media that have more well-developed female characters. I decided to do a brief analysis of a few stories focused on women and their relationships to each other, and of a few popular ensemble cast shows with at least two strong female characters. I also tossed in AO3 as a whole and Sherlock (a show low on female characters [especially at the time of the original analysis]) for comparison:

You can see the numbers in the [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0An4FLglv75zTdDFGbnlheWtnZWtWR2pYLUZMVnZjREE&oid=2&zx=2udtv69q55yy).  

Keep in mind that the number of works in some of these fandoms is very small — there are fewer than 100 works apiece for Bridesmaids, Anne of Green Gables, and My So-Called Life — so the exact percentages are not terribly reliable. Still, we can see that having a higher number of well-developed female characters and female interactions definitely correlates with an increase in femslash.(At least among the media I’ve chosen here, which were generated somewhat arbitrarily via my own brainstorming.) [However, the fandoms highlighted in Chapter 1 as having a high proportion of F/F fic seem to back up my hypothesis.]

I don’t think that’s the only factor at play (I’m also fascinated by all the queer women writers out there, myself included, who mostly focus on M/M pairings), but I suspect if we had an even playing field to start with, it would drastically change the ratio of femslash to other relationship categories.

Also, a quick historical note: according to another person who responded to my series (whose note I can’t find right now — so sorry to not give credit!), AO3 was founded by people mostly producing M/M slash, and their friends and readers were the first to start populating the archive. There’s a decent chance that this initial population bias has remained as the archive has grown — resources that get used mostly by a certain community will become well-known within that community, and attract more members of that type (in this case, M/M writers). So AO3 may be more biased than fandom overall. I don’t know of any other archives that let you search by relationship category in the same way (FF.net doesn’t seem to), so I can’t immediately test this theory.


	3. Possible reasons for scarcity of femslash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted to [Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/73735946699/even-when-female-characters-exist-in-canon) on January 18, 2014, in response to an article by [Lady Geek Girl & Friends](http://ladygeekgirl.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/sexualized-saturdays-femslash-and-fandom/) which quoted my stats.

Another interesting and stats-heavy article from [Lady Geek Girl & Friends](http://ladygeekgirl.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/sexualized-saturdays-femslash-and-fandom/). I agree with a bunch of these points, especially this one:

> Just as the answer to “Why is there so much slash?” cannot be boiled down to “Well, straight girls are horny”, the answer to “Why isn’t there any femslash?” cannot be boiled down to “Well, straight girls don’t care.”

Nothing is ever that simple. Even more than that quote indicates, I think it’s really hard to tease out how much each of the following factors contribute to the slash/femslash imbalance:

  * More well-developed male characters in media 
  * More male characters who are heroic or anti-heroic in ways that make them compelling fanfic characters 
  * More pairs of male characters who interact onscreen in substantive/interesting ways 
  * Societal conditioning to dismiss female sexuality relative to male sexuality, and to privilege the male gaze (which this article posits is the most compelling explanation) 
  * Societal expectations that the man is the aggressive one in a relationship — the one who makes the move first; we have lots of examples of this in stories, and fewer examples of how women initiate relationships 
  * The fact that people who possess penises more obviously signal their arousal than people who don’t 
  * The fact that there is still an extra level of taboo surrounding M/M relationships, even more than F/F, in most cultures 
  * The fact that female characters are far more likely to overtly talk about their feelings — onscreen M/M relationships are far more likely to remain unanalyzed and ambiguous; it’s likely easier to read UST into them and to have an obvious reason that the characters wouldn’t have ever talked about it out onscreen 
  * Fanfic authors who don’t want to read/write about female sexuality because it hits too close to home in various ways (e.g., if they want to explore dubcon in a way that doesn’t feel too real/personally threatening) 
  * Fanfic authors who want to write characters who don’t have to personally deal with the negative effects of sexism/female stereotypes & expectations/gender-related threats of violence 
  * Fanfic authors who are more turned on by men than by women 
  * Relatedly, fanfic authors who mostly want to write about two people they are personally attracted to having sex 
  * Fanfic authors who are queer themselves and want to write queer relationships (starting from the relationships they already find interesting in media)



…and, I’m quite sure, lots more.

None of these factors alone explains the prevalence of M/M and paucity of F/F pairings in fandom. (E.g., as the article points out, Mystrade and Sterek are more popular ships than F/F ships with similar amounts of onscreen time in the same fandoms, so it’s not simply about the amount of screen time for characters or pairings — but that doesn’t mean it’s not one important factor.) But I don’t think we have data to support any one of these as the primary reason for the slash dynamics of fandom. 

The same causal factors — societal biases and gender expectations, authorial empathy and identification, biology and attraction — may underlie most/all of these factors. But that doesn’t mean that we can point to only one or a few reasons for the relative popularity of slash. Biology + culture + individual experience is a very complex system. For various fans, different factors on the above list will be most personally compelling.

None of which is to say that we shouldn’t examine the systemic reasons for the amount of slash and femslash, and try to decide which factors are good/bad/neutral, and work to correct the ones that should be corrected. But I think it’s unnecessary and oversimplified to boil this conversation down to a single factor. (NB: I am not saying this article did that — it’s mostly a reasonably nuanced article, and brings up some excellent points. But I see almost all conversations about this topic highlighting one or two factors and ignoring the rest, and so I thought I’d use this article as a jumping off point to try to broaden the discussion.)


End file.
